A MAN OF LETTERS
Lowell first saw Maria White on the first of December, 1839. At the
moment, I suppose, he did not know that it was preordained that they
two should be one. Mr. Norton has hunted out an early letter of his
which he wrote the day after that meeting: “I went up to Watertown on
Saturday with W.A. White, and spent the Sabbath with him.... His sister
is a very pleasant and pleasing young lady, and knows more poetry than
any one I am acquainted with. I mean, she is able to repeat more. She
is more familiar, however, with modern poets than with the pure
wellsprings of English poesy.” The truth is that their union was made
in heaven, that it was a perfect marriage, that they belonged together
and lived one life. She was exquisitely beautiful; her tastes and
habits were perfectly simple; her education, as I look back on what I
know of it, seems to me as perfect as any education can be. Among other
experiences which did her no harm, she was one of the frightened girls
who fled from the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown before it was
destroyed by a mob, in 1834. Her mother was one of the most charming
women who ever lived. A cluster of sisters, of all ages down to romping
little girls, young women of exquisite sensitiveness and character, and
with such a training as such a mother would be sure to give, made the
great Watertown house the most homelike of homes. In such a home Lowell
found his beautiful wife, and they loved each other from the beginning.
[Illustration:
MARIA LOWELL
_From the crayon by S.W. Rowse, in the possession of Miss Georgina
Lowell Putnam, Boston_]
I remember, while I am writing these lines, that all the five young men
spoken of in the last chapter entered their names, on graduating, on
the books of the Law School. They spent more or less of the next
eighteen months at Cambridge. Their intimacy, however, did not spring
from this. It might be said, indeed, that they all went to the Law
School because they were intimate, rather than that they were intimate
because they went to the Law School. Of the five, King only was a
professional lawyer through his life. His honored father before him,
John Glen King, of the Harvard class of 1807, a learned and scholarly
man, had been a distinguished leader at the Essex bar. Story gave most
of his life to letters and to art, but his earliest publication is a
series of Law Reports, and he afterwards published—in 1844—a book on
Contracts. My brother, after he opened his law office, was early turned
away from his profession to the management of the “Daily Advertiser;”
and White, who died at the age of thirty-six, before any of the rest of
them, gave so much of his time to the temperance and anti-slavery
reforms, and to political work, that he cannot be spoken of as a
practicing lawyer. None of them are now living.
With another classmate Lowell was on the most intimate terms—Dr. George
Bailey Loring, since distinguished as the head of the Department of
Agriculture in Washington. Loring studied medicine at the same time
when Lowell went to the Law School; but Lowell frequently visited
Loring’s beautiful home in Andover, and from schooldays forward the
similarity of their tastes brought them into almost constant
correspondence in matters of literature. Dr. Loring was the son of the
minister of Andover, and that gentleman and Lowell’s father had been
friends. For us now, this has proved singularly fortunate; for Loring
carefully preserved all his letters from Lowell, and Mr. Norton has
selected from them many for publication, which throw valuable light
upon these early days, in which Lowell really revealed everything to
this friend. He was always frank to the utmost with his correspondents,
and relied upon their discretion. He was never more annoyed than when a
correspondent or an interviewer presumed upon this frankness in
repeating, or half repeating, anything, where Lowell had relied on the
discretion of a gentleman. Dr. Loring sympathized entirely with
Lowell’s growing determination to devote himself to literary work, and
this sympathy naturally encouraged him, as he broke off, sooner than he
perhaps expected, from the practice of law.
Lowell once wrote a funny story which he called “My First Client.” I
guess that at the bottom it was true. I think that when the painter who
had painted his sign came in with his bill, Lowell thought for a moment
that he had a client. Out of this he spun an amusing “short story.”
This little sketch of his has, in itself, given the impression,
perhaps, that he cared nothing about the law, and that his LL. B. on
the college catalogue and his admission to the Suffolk bar were purely
perfunctory. It is true that he never practiced, and that before long
he stopped paying office rent, and that his sign was taken down. But it
is not true that he threw away the three years when he pretended to be
studying for his profession. In those days the Massachusetts custom was
that a young lawyer who sought the best studied for a year and a half
at Cambridge under Story and Greenleaf, then spent as much time in a
lawyer’s office, and then entered at the bar after a formal
examination. In this way Lowell spent three or four terms at Cambridge,
and then he spent as much time in regular attendance in the office of
his father’s friend and parishioner, the Hon. Charles Greeley Loring,
for many years a leader at the Boston bar. It is not difficult to trace
the results of Lowell’s faithful work in these three years in his after
writing. Any person makes a great mistake who infers from the _abandon_
of some of his literary fun that he did not know how to work, steadily
and faithfully, better than the worst Philistine who was ever born.
But the stars in their courses did not propose that he should be a
chief justice, or a celebrated writer on torts, or that he should make
brilliant pleas before a jury. They had other benefits in store for the
world.
It is pathetic now to see how little welcome there was then for a young
poet, or how little temptation for a literary career. It was thought a
marvel that the first “New England Magazine” and the “North American
Review” should pay a dollar a page to their writers. In Longfellow’s
Life, as in Mr. Lowell’s early letters, you find notes of the
“Knickerbocker,” “Godey,” and “Graham,” at Philadelphia, and the
“Southern Literary,” as willing to print what was good, but there is
evidence enough that the writers wrote for fame in the intervals spared
them from earning their bread and butter. Holmes speaks as if he should
have lost caste in his profession in those early days had he been known
as a literary man. He even implies that Lowell himself dragged him back
to his literary career.
But better times for American letters or for the independent profession
of literary men were at hand. “Graham’s Magazine” and “Godey’s Lady’s
Book” had achieved what was called a large circulation. Stimulated by
their success, two young publishers in Boston, named Bradbury and
Soden, determined to try a magazine in New England which should appeal
for its support to the supposed literary class of the country, as
Blackwood did, and, in America, the “Portfolio,” the “Knickerbocker,”
and the “Literary Messenger.” But it was also to print fashion-plates,
and so appeal to the women of the country, even if they did not care
for literature. So it was to be called “The Boston Miscellany of
Literature and Fashion.” There were to be forty-six pages of
literature, with a good steel engraving, in every number, and two pages
of fashion, with a fashion-plate.
My brother was to be responsible for the literature, and somebody, I
think in New York, for the fashion, with which the former had nothing
to do. I remember he had to explain this to Mrs. Stowe, whom he had
asked to contribute. She had declined because she had been shocked by a
décolletée figure on one of these plates. Dear Mrs. Stowe, in her
English progress ten years afterwards, had an opportunity to reconcile
herself with dresses much more pronounced.
The “Atlantic” to-day calls itself a journal of literature, art,
science, and politics. It does not undertake to reconcile fashion with
literature. If Messrs. Bradbury and Soden had been questioned, they
would have said, what was true, that there was no class of readers who
could sustain creditably a purely literary magazine. The rate at which
the poor “Knickerbocker” was expiring was evidence of this. But they
would have said that there were a great many factory-girls in the
country for whom there was no journal of fashion. They would have said
that these girls could be relied upon to float the literary magazine,
if in each number there was a love-story which they would be glad to
read. And I remember that there was great glee in the counting-room
when it was announced that a thousand copies of the new magazine had
been sold in Lowell.
My brother was very stiff about concessions to the fashionable side.
Two pages might be fashion, and as bad fashion as the publishers
wanted, but his forty-six pages were to be the best which he could
command. After a few numbers had been issued, he made a negotiation
with Duyckinck, the editor of the “Arcturus,” by which the short-lived
magazine was transferred to him. This gave him the help of some of the
bright New Yorkers. They sent to him their accumulated manuscripts, and
I then saw the handwriting of Elizabeth Barrett—Mrs. Browning—for the
first time. Soon after this these young men in Boston made the personal
acquaintance of their New York correspondents, and from that time began
Lowell’s close friendship with Mr. Charles F. Briggs.
Of other writers rising to fame, who were secured for the “Miscellany,”
was Hawthorne, who, to the great pleasure of all of us, contributed the
article “A Virtuoso’s Collection.” Lowell probably met him for the
first time at Elizabeth Peabody’s. Hawthorne soon after married her
charming sister. As a _nom de plume_ for a great deal of his work,
Hawthorne assumed the French translation of his name. His stories in
the “Democratic Review” of this time were attributed to “Monsieur
d’Aubépine.” Lowell says of him in his Concord address: “You would
think me extravagant, I fear, if I said how highly I rate the genius of
Hawthorne in the history of literature. At any rate, Hawthorne taught
us one great and needful lesson; and that is, that our own past was an
ample storehouse for the brightest works of imagination or fancy.”
[Illustration: CHARLES F. BRIGGS]
It is interesting now to see that Walt Whitman, who then called himself
Walter, had begun as early as this his literary career.
The page of the “Miscellany” was an imitation as precise as possible of
the page which Edward Moxon in London had adopted for several of his
popular series. All these young men had read and enjoyed the first part
of Browning’s “Bells and Pomegranates,” which had appeared with Moxon’s
imprint in this form in 1842.
I speak at this length of the “Miscellany,” of which we print a
facsimile of one page, because in that year Lowell really made his
determination to lead a literary life. It was not the life of a poet
simply, but a life of letters, to which from this time he looked
forward. To the volume of the “Miscellany” published in 1842 he
contributed the following: three articles on “Old English Dramatists,”
the two sketches “My First Client” and “Getting Up,” and, in verse, the
sonnet to Keats, “The Two,” “To Perdita Singing,” “Fantasy,” “The
Shepherd of King Admetus,” and two unnamed sonnets.
In the second number of the “Miscellany,” under the date of December,
1841, appeared also the “Ode” which he afterwards thought worth
reprinting in the collected edition of his works. One cannot but see in
it a careful statement of his own hopes and resolves for his future. It
was originally printed in stanzas of four lines; as he recast it
subsequently, the breaks between the stanzas disappear. The following
characteristic verses show what was central in his thought and feeling
at this time:—
“This, this is he for whom the world is waiting
To sing the beatings of its mighty heart.
Too long hath it been patient with the grating
Of scrannel-pipes, and heard it misnamed Art.
“To him the smiling soul of man shall listen,
Laying awhile its crown of thorns aside,
And once again in every eye shall glisten
The glory of a nature satisfied.
“His verse shall have a great commanding motion,
Heaving and swelling with a melody
Learnt of the sky, the river, and the ocean,
And all the pure, majestic things that be.
“Awake, then, thou! we pine for thy great presence
To make us feel the soul once more sublime.
We are of far too infinite an Essence
To rest contented with the lies of Time.
“Speak out! and lo, a hush of deepest wonder
Shall sink o’er all this many voicèd scene,
As when a sudden burst of rattling thunder
Shatters the blueness of a sky serene.”
In a private note on the 8th of July he says of this Ode: “I esteem it
the best I ever wrote.” And he adds, “I find that my pen follows my
soul more easily the older I grow. I know that I have a mission to
accomplish, and if I live I will do the work my Father giveth me to do.”
At the end of the year, when my brother resigned the management of the
“Miscellany,” Lowell and his friend Robert Carter ventured on the
“Pioneer,” which was to be a magazine of “literature and art.” Fashion
was thrown out of the window; and for illustrations, they began with
some good pictures from Flaxman.
[Illustration:
CONTENTS PAGE OF THE BOSTON “MISCELLANY”
_The Authors’ names are in the handwriting of Nathan Hale_]
Lowell was already engaged to be married to Miss White. Their lives
were wholly bound up in each other. He was writing to her charming
letters in poetry and in prose, and she to him in letters as charming.
They read together, they dreamed together, they forecast the future
together. In such a daily atmosphere it was natural that he should
choose that future rightly.
“Perhaps then first he understood
Himself how wondrously endued.”
He knew what was in him. By this time he knew he could work steadily,
and when he wrote in triumph,
“I am a maker and a poet,
I feel it and I know it,”
he wrote in that frank confidence in his future which his future wholly
justified.
In the fifth volume of the present series of the “New England Magazine”
Mr. Mead has given us a charming article on the three numbers of the
“Pioneer.” These numbers are now among the rarities most prized by
American book collectors. And there is hardly a page of the “Pioneer”
which one does not read with a certain interest, in view of what has
followed. At the end of three numbers the journal died, because it had
not subscribers enough to pay for it. It may be observed in this
history of our early magazines that all these publishers lived on what
we may call placer gold-washings, for nobody here had yet discovered
the quartz rock of an advertising patronage. In the “Miscellany” and
the “Pioneer” no enterprising advertiser assisted in the payment of the
bills. There was not one advertisement in either. The English magazines
printed advertisements long before.
In Lowell’s Introductory, written, as will be observed, when he was not
yet twenty-four years old, he gives what Mr. Mead well calls a
characteristic expression of those views of American literature which
always controlled him afterward: “Everything that tends to encourage
the sentiment of caste should be steadily resisted by all good men. But
we do long for a natural literature. One green leaf, though of the
veriest weed, is worth all the crape and wire flowers of the daintiest
Paris milliners.” The whole article is well worth study by the young
critics now.
It is rather funny to see, in these days, that Nathaniel Parker Willis,
who then considered himself as the leader of the young literature of
America, gave this opinion of Lowell in reviewing the first number of
the “Pioneer:”—
“J.R. Lowell, a man of original and decided genius, has started a
monthly magazine in Boston. The first number lies before us, and it
justifies our expectation,—namely, that a man of genius, who is merely
a man of genius, is a very unfit editor for a periodical.”
This remark of Willis is interesting now, since Lowell has proved
himself perhaps the best literary editor whom the history of American
journalism has yet discovered. It is just possible, as the reader will
see, that Willis did not write this himself.
Lowell’s connection with the “Pioneer” occupied him for the closing
months of 1842 and the beginning of 1843. This was at a period when his
eyes troubled him badly. Writing from New York, he says: “Every morning
I go to Dr. Elliott’s (who, by the way, is very kind) and wait for my
turn to be operated upon. This sometimes consumes a great deal of time,
the Doctor being overrun with patients. After being made stone blind
for the space of fifteen minutes, I have the rest of the day to myself.”
On the 17th of January he writes, “My eyes, having been operated on
yesterday _with the knife_, must be used charily;” and again on the 22d
he writes that he had had a second operation performed on the 20th.
“Handbills of the ‘Pioneer’ in red and black, with a spread eagle at
the head of them, face me everywhere. I could not but laugh to see a
drayman standing with his hands in his pockets diligently spelling it
out, being attracted thereto doubtless by the bird of America, which
probably led him to think it the Proclamation of the President, a
delusion from which he probably did not awake after perusing the
document.”
And on the 24th he says: “I can scarcely get through with one letter
without pain, and everything that I write retards my cure, and so keeps
me the longer here. But I love Keats so much that I think I can write
something good about him.... If you knew how I am placed, you would not
write me so. I am forbidden to write under pain of staying here forever
or _losing my eyes_.” And in the same letter, “I must not write any
more.”
“Have you got any copy for the third number? Do not ask any
conservatives to write, for it will mar the unity of the magazine. We
shall be surer of success if we maintain a uniform course and have a
decided tendency either one way or the other. We shall at least gain
more influence in that way.”
In New York he often met Willis personally, and the more he saw of him
the better he liked him. I think this was what happened with most
people who met Willis. It certainly was so with me. In personal
intimacy the studied affectation of his printed work disappeared. It
was studied, as almost any one could guess without seeing him. Willis
also was at this time under Dr. Elliott’s care for treatment of his
eyes. He told Dr. Elliott that Lowell had written the most remarkable
poetry that had been written in this country, and that he was destined
to be the brightest star that had yet risen in American literature. He
told Lowell himself that he was more popular and more talked about than
any other poet in the land, and promised him that he would help the
“Pioneer” in every way. At this time Willis was as highly regarded by
young people, especially by the sort of people who read magazines, as
any literary man in America.
Elizabeth Barrett, not yet married, had written for the Boston
“Miscellany,” and on the 20th of January Lowell acknowledges four poems
from her.[7] There were but three numbers of the “Pioneer” published.
It has been the fashion to speak of it in a pitying tone, as if it were
a mere foolish enterprise of two callow boys. But if between the
numbers or between the articles one reads, as I have done, the
correspondence between Lowell and his “true friend and brother,” Robert
Carter, one feels that the “Pioneer” failed of success only from a
series of misfortunes. Looking back upon it now, it is easy to say that
it needed capital for a beginning. Most things do in our modern world.
It is clear enough in this case that the strongest reason for
undertaking it was that Lowell lived and was at the beginning of his
successful career. Without him there would have been no “Pioneer.”
Knowing this, when you find that through January and February he was
prohibited from writing, that week after week he was submitting to
operations on his eyes, and that he was in actual danger of permanent
blindness, you cease to ask why the “Pioneer” died at the end of its
third number, and you wonder, on the other hand, that it lived at all.
When one remembers the currency which Lowell’s volumes of essays have
had from the very beginning, he reads with special interest more than
amusement the following note from Miss White, who had seen the
publisher, which is pathetic. It describes the persuasion necessary to
induce anybody to attempt the bold venture of issuing the first in that
remarkable series:—
“I went to see Mr. Owen this afternoon, to talk to him about publishing
James’s prose volume. He expressed himself greatly pleased with the
articles, but said he wished to _wait_ until James’s prose was better
known to the public before he ventured upon it. Then I told him of the
flattering notices of his ‘Old Dramatists’ that appeared at the time
they came out, and of the lavish praise his prose style received. He
said that changed the face of affairs wholly; that if he were as sure
of the public as himself he should not hesitate. He said he wished to
see you and talk about it with you also.”
Let all young writers remember this, that the public knows what it
wants, whether publishers are doubtful or no. I may add the remark,
which I believe to be wholly true, of one of the most successful
publishers of our day, “No one on earth knows, when a book is
published, whether it will sell five thousand copies or not. But if
five thousand copies are sold, nothing is more certain than that
twenty-five thousand can be.”
[Illustration:
LOWELL’S LIST OF FRIENDS TO WHOM HE PRESENTED COPIES OF
“CONVERSATIONS ON THE OLD POETS”
_“The Don” was Robert Carter_]
Mr. Lowell and Miss White were married in the end of December, 1844,
with the good wishes, I might say, of everybody. Among her other
exquisite faculties she had a sense of humor as keen as his, and both
of them would run on, in the funniest way, about their plans for
economical housekeeping. Sheet-iron air-tight stoves had just come into
being. I believe I never see one to this day without recollecting in
what an amusing vein of absurd exaggeration she once showed, in her
lively talk, how much they were going to save in the detail of domestic
life by the use of that most unromantic bit of household machinery.
“A Year’s Life,” his maiden volume of poems, had been published in
1841, about the time of their engagement. We used to pretend that weeks
in advance of the publication multitudes of young girls who took a
tender interest in this most romantic of marriages walked daily from
one to another of the half-dozen book-shops in little Boston to inquire
if “A Year’s Life” were ready, and thus to stimulate the interest and
curiosity of booksellers and their clerks. I think that the larger
publishers of to-day even would say that the sale was more than is to
be expected from any new volume of short poems. This was, of course,
only a retail sale in Boston and the neighboring towns. There was as
yet no demand for “Lowell’s Poems” in New York, Philadelphia, or London.
Seeing the future of the author’s poetical reputation, I think that
young authors may be interested in reading the letter in which he first
proposes modestly to print this book:—
“I think, nay I am sure, that I have written some worthy things, and
though I feel well enough pleased with myself, yet it is a great joy to
us all to be known and understood by others. I do long for somebody to
like what I have written, and me for what I have written, who does not
know me. You and I were cured of the mere _cacoethes imprimendi_
(Rufus) by our connection with ‘Harvardiana:’ I think that so far we
should be thankful to it, as it taught us that print was no proof of
worthiness, and that we need not look for a movement of the world when
our pieces were made known in print.
“Now, if you will find out how much it would cost to print 400 copies
(if you think I could sell so many; if not, 300) in decent style (150
pages—less if printed closely), like Jones Very’s book, for instance, I
could find out if I could get an indorser. I should not charge less
than $1 per vol.—should you? I don’t care so much for the style of
printing as to get it printed in any way.
“Jones Very’s style would be good, too, because it might be printed by
our old printers, and that would be convenient about the proofs.”
In the subsequent collections of his poems he omitted many of those
which are in this pioneer volume. And for this reason, among others,
the volume is in great demand among collectors. But it is easy to see
that he had even then—two years only after the class poem—outgrown the
crudities of younger days which we find in turning over “Harvardiana.”
There is serious purpose now, though it be expressed only in two or
three words together. Some of these are the poems of a lover. Yes! but
they are also the poems of a serious young man who knows that there is
duty next his hand, and who is determined, with God’s help and with the
help of her he loves best, to carry that duty through.
The spirit of the book reflects thus the same sense of a mission to
mankind which appears in the letters which have been preserved from a
full correspondence which he maintained with Heath, a young Virginian.
Frank Heath, as his friends called him, graduated at Cambridge while
Lowell was in the Law School, and a close intimacy had grown up between
them. When Heath left college in August, 1840, he returned to Virginia.
There is a careful letter from Lowell to him which has a curious
interest now, in the light of the history which followed. Lowell begs
him to lead the way and to make himself the typical man in the new
history of Virginia by emancipating his own slaves and leading in the
establishment of a new civilization there. In fact, Heath soon went to
Europe, and was lost to his friends here for nearly twenty years in one
or another German university. He returned to his own country in time to
take a prominent post in the Confederate army, and I think he lost an
arm in one of the battles of the rebellion.
The publication of “A Year’s Life” showed that Lowell was a poet. This
was now beyond discussion. The papers in the “Miscellany” and the
“Pioneer” now showed, what people in the little literary circles of
America knew, that he wrote prose well and that he had more than an
amateur’s knowledge of the older English literature. He could work
steadily and faithfully.
In the autumn of 1843 and the winter of 1843–44, however, as has been
said, he had trouble with his eyes, and he lived for some time in New
York for their better treatment. Mrs. Lowell also, always of delicate
health, required a more genial climate than Elmwood or Watertown would
give her. Her lungs were delicate, and after their marriage, to escape
the harsh climate of Boston, they spent the winter of 1844-45 in
Philadelphia. It need not be said that in each city they made very near
personal friends who felt and treasured the personal attraction of each
of them,—an attraction which it is impossible to describe.
In the same winter the Southern party in Congress and the speculators
who had bought Texan bonds for next to nothing were engaged in driving
through the last Congress of President Tyler’s administration the
“joint resolutions” by which Texas was annexed to the United States.
There were no precedents for such annexation. What would seem the
natural course in an agreement between two republics would have been a
formal treaty between them. But it was known that no treaty for such a
purpose could pass the United States Senate. It was determined,
therefore, by the friends of annexation, who had such support as Mr.
Tyler and his Cabinet could give, that they would drive these “joint
resolutions” through Congress. And this was done. The resolutions
passed the Senate by a majority of one only. They passed the day before
Mr. Tyler went out of office. Here was the first pitched battle in
Congress on a definite national issue between the North and South since
that defeat of the North in the Missouri Compromise which had so
excited Charles Lowell the year after his son was born. The whole
country, North and South, was wild with excitement, as well it might be.
[Illustration:
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
_From a daguerreotype taken at Philadelphia in 1844_]
Lowell was ready to give himself to the side of freedom with his pen or
with his voice. At this time he engaged in the service first of the
“Liberty Bell,” an anti-slavery annual published in Boston, and
afterwards of the “National Anti-Slavery Standard.” Mrs. Lowell also
wrote for both journals.
The “Standard” was a weekly journal of great originality and ability,
published in New York under the auspices of one of the national
anti-slavery societies. The editor was Sydney Howard Gay, afterwards so
distinguished as a historian, and holding all his life the most
important trusts as a journalist in New York. He worked with Bryant in
the “Evening Post.” He worked with Greeley in the “Tribune.” It is not
too late to hope that his memoirs will be collected and published. They
will throw a flood of light on points not yet fully revealed in the
history of the twenty years which led up to the fall of Richmond and
the emancipation of America.
Most organs, so called, of a special philanthropy are narrow and
bigoted, and so, by the divine law which rules narrowness and bigotry,
are preëminently dull. Witness most missionary journals and all
temperance journals, so far as this writer has observed. We owed it to
Gay, I suppose, that the “Anti-Slavery Standard,” while pitiless in its
denunciation of slavery, was neither narrow, bigoted, nor dull. Lydia
Maria Child’s letters from New York, which were published in it once a
week, are still remembered among editors. They give an ideal type for
writing in that line, in a series of papers which may well be studied
by young journalists, for, though often imitated, they have never been
equaled. They are the despair of “leading editors” who try to get such
work done for them and never succeed.
Lowell engaged himself to write regularly for the “Standard,” and did
so for some years. His prose papers in that journal have never been
collected, but they would be well worth collection. And the poems he
wrote at this time, sometimes political, but not always so, generally
appeared in the “Standard.” The headquarters of the young people were
now at Elmwood in Cambridge. Here their oldest children were born, and
here their oldest child died. It was then that Maria Lowell wrote that
charming poem which has been read with sympathetic tears in so many
homes from which “the Good Shepherd” has called away one of his lambs.
I have often heard it said that the “Biglow Papers,” which followed
soon after, introduced Lowell in England, and I suppose it was so. You
never can tell what they will like in England, or what they will not
like. But this is clear, that, having little or no humor of their own,
they are curiously alive for humor in others. And the dialect of the
“Biglow Papers,” which is no burlesque or exaggeration, but simply
perfect New England talk, is in itself curious enough and suggestive
enough to have introduced letters on any theme.
Literary people in England still fancied that they were opposed to the
principle of slavery, as, in truth, a considerable number of them were.
And between the outspoken abolitionists of America and those of England
there was then a freemasonry tender and charming, though sometimes
absurd and amusing. I suppose this first introduced the Biglow letters,
with their rollicking fun, their absolute good sense and vigorous
suggestions, into England. Once introduced, they took care of
themselves, and went wherever there were readers of sense or even
intelligence. They began in a spurt of fun about a little local passage
in Massachusetts politics.
“Fer John P.
Robinson he
Sez he wunt vote fer Guvnor B.”
The success of the first numbers naturally led Lowell to carry them
further, and they became in the end an important factor in the
anti-slavery politics of New England.
Meanwhile, as our next chapter will show, what we now look back upon as
the “lecture system” was developing itself in the Northern States. With
the ordinary stupidity of ecclesiasticism, most of the organized
churches had succeeded in shutting out from their services the ultra
speakers on whatever question. They confined their sermons on Sunday to
the decorous wish-wash in which average men treated in a harmless way
subjects to which the people were indifferent. Speaking of the English
pulpit at the same period, under conditions not far different, Jowett
says: “Really, I never hear a sermon of which it is possible to
conceive that the writer has a serious belief about things. If you
could but cross-examine him, he would perjure himself every other
sentence.” The indifference with which wide-awake Americans,
particularly of the younger generation, regarded such preaching,
resulted in the development of the “lyceum system” of the North. Of
this I will speak in some detail in the next chapter. It is enough to
say here that the organized churches might thank themselves if they
found, introduced into every community on weekdays, the most radical
views, and frequently by speakers who would not have pretended to
address them on Sundays. I am trying not to travel outside the line
which I have marked for myself in these papers; but I do not pass that
line when I say that a sort of indignation was aroused through the
whole Northern community because the established church, in its various
communions, was unwilling to devote itself to what was clearly its
business, the fair discussion of the most important subject bearing on
right and wrong which could possibly come before any people. The reader
will find some valuable notes by Mr. Higginson, interesting of course,
in “Cheerful Yesterdays.” “All of which he saw, and much of which he
was.”
I refer to this now not because Lowell was often engaged in lecturing
as one of the anti-slavery speakers. It must be remembered that this
book is not so much a history of his life, as an effort to show the
circumstances which surrounded his life and which account for the
course of it. In his weekly contributions to the press, whether in
prose or in verse, he kept in touch with the men and women who were
quite in advance in forming the Northern or national sentiment of the
crisis.
The “Liberty Bell” and the “Standard,” with his bright and suggestive
articles, went into the circles which summoned Parker and Phillips and
Garrison to give them instruction or inspiration which they would have
sought in vain from the more decorous pulpits of that day. So it
happened that, although he did not “enter the lecture field” as early
as some of his companions and friends in the anti-slavery cause, he
was, in those years of the awakening, perfectly well known among those
interested in that cause.
In this connection it interests me to remember that the last time I saw
his father, Dr. Lowell, was at the house in Elmwood in 1855. I went to
him to ask for his assent and signature in a memorial relating to the
freedom of Kansas, which was addressed to what we then called “The
Three Thousand New England Clergymen.” I went to him because he was one
of the oldest Congregational ministers in New England, and because he
had always deprecated the separation between the evangelical and
liberal branches of that body. He sympathized heartily in what we were
doing, signed his name at the head of our circular-letter, and then put
his hand on my head, and in the most cordial and pathetic way gave me
and our cause an old man’s benediction. This, the reader should note,
took place in the spring of 1855.
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